How outrageous are the cultural relics dug out from the ground? I was shocked by the tiger alone

How outrageous can the cultural relics dug out from underground be?

Are you sure you didn't travel back in time?

And a special reminder to everyone here that this year is the Year of the Tiger...

At the end of 2021, a bronze statue in the shape of a dragon with a "tiger head and tiger brain" was unearthed from Pit 8 of the Sanxingdui Ruins.

Archaeologists are introducing the bronze dragon statue unearthed from Sanxingdui Pit No. 8 (Source: CCTV.com)

There is not only this tiger, we have "dug up" many tiger-related cultural relics.

Sanxingdui Culture: Tiger-shaped gold foil

In the skillful hands of the ancestors of Sanxingdui culture, a small "gold lump" was repeatedly beaten into thin gold sheets, which became a tiger with a length of 2-3 meters. This is the "tiger-shaped gold foil".

They also carefully observed the vertical black stripes on the tiger's fur, so they came up with the idea of ​​printing "目"-shaped patterns on gold foil to represent the tiger's stripes.

When a tiger is preparing to attack its prey or mate, it will make a mighty roar. The ancestors of the Sanxingdui culture could often hear this sound, and while they were terrified, they also recorded the tiger's "roaring" behavior and displayed it on tiger-shaped gold foil: the tiger's head was held high, its mouth wide open, and it was roaring!

Archaeologists believe that this thing may not exist independently, but may be an "accessory" pasted on some special objects, reflecting the tradition of "worshiping tigers" among the people in the ancient Bashu region.

Tiger-shaped gold foil (Source: Sanxingdui Museum)

The Sanxingdui ruins are located in the Chengdu Plain, and its cultural age is roughly the same as the Shang culture in the Central Plains. Although it is difficult to see tigers in the wild in this area now, the distribution density of tigers in historical periods was quite terrifying.

The historical distribution of tigers in the Chengdu Plain shows that tigers were widely distributed in the Chengdu Plain before the 20th century. It should not have been difficult for the ancestors of the Sanxingdui culture to observe tigers (Source: Atlas of the Distribution Changes of Rare Wild Animals in China)

Hongshan Culture: Tiger-shaped jade ornaments

If the tiger-shaped gold foil shows the observation of the habits of tigers by the ancestors of the Sanxingdui culture, then the tiger-shaped jade plaque below shows the understanding of the specific characteristics of tigers by the ancestors of the "Hongshan culture".

Sketch of a tiger-shaped jade plaque from the Hongshan culture (Source: Chifeng Museum)

Since we haven't found the original, let's just look at the sketch. We can directly see the full picture of the tiger from one side.

The ancestors of the Hongshan culture were very fond of exaggeration. Look, they "enlarged" the tiger's eyes to the point that they looked like they were protruding from the head, although the tiger's eyes are indeed not small, hahaha!

The ancestors of the Hongshan culture also depicted a tiger with its mouth wide open in their jade plaques, but what is more detailed than the tiger-shaped gold foil of the Sanxingdui culture is that they depicted the tiger's teeth. You can clearly see its teeth protruding from its mouth, like long swords.

This requires a little discussion. You should know that in the history of biology, the mammals with this kind of "saber teeth" mainly include the Hyaenodontidae, Nimravidae, and the Machairodontinae subfamily under the Felidae.

So, does this tiger-shaped jade plaque from the Hongshan culture represent the tiger as we know it, or one of these three types of animals?

The Hongshan culture is about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, which is equivalent to the middle and late Yangshao culture in the Central Plains. However, based on the current fossil evidence, species of hyaenodonts and nilgai have successively become extinct in the Miocene (about 23 million to 5.33 million years ago), which is too different from the age of the Hongshan culture and is therefore excluded.

Skull of Hyaenodon (Source: National Museum of Natural History, France)

The last remaining saber-toothed tiger subfamily mainly lived from the Miocene to the Pleistocene (about 16 million years ago to 11,000 years ago). It can be said that although the lower limit of its survival period is greatly closer to the upper limit of the Hongshan culture period, there is still some distance, so it can be ruled out.

Therefore, before newer fossil evidence can prove that the saber-toothed tiger subfamily became extinct later, Tadpole believes that the "saber teeth" on the tiger-shaped jade plaques of the Hongshan culture are an artistic exaggeration of the canine teeth of ordinary tigers.

Smilodon, a common saber-toothed tiger from South America (illustration by DiBgd)

Yangshao Culture: Clam Shells with Dragon and Tiger Patterns

The ancestors of the Yangshao culture couldn't sit still! What's the point of using such good materials as gold and jade? Give it up and look at the "tiger" we made with the often discarded clam shells as the material!

Archaeologists have discovered remains of the Yangshao culture dating back more than 6,000 years among the numerous cultural layers of the Xishuipo site in Puyang, Henan Province. Among them, they have found several rare and shocking "animal patterns" made of clam shells. The third group, with its "dragon and tiger" theme pattern, is particularly spectacular. Let's see how the archaeological excavation report of that year described this picture.

The third group of clam shell sculptures with dragon and tiger patterns at the Xishuipo site (drawn by the archaeological team of the Xishuipo site in Puyang)

In the south-central part of the whole pattern is a sculpture of a "dragon", with its head facing east and its back facing north. The head of the dragon is held high and its body is stretched out. A person is riding on the dragon's back, with his two feet straddling the dragon's back, one hand in front and the other behind, with his cheek slightly tilted, as if he is looking back and observing something.

The majestic tiger is placed to the north of the dragon, with its head facing west and its back facing south. Like the dragon, the tiger holds its head high, its tail sticks up high, and its mane stands up like pine needles, as if ready to run.

Regarding the saying "the tail is raised high", generally speaking, when a tiger's tail is raised at the tip, sometimes shaking constantly and making a low roar, it may be in a state of alert. Except for the tip of the tail, the rest of the tail is usually not in such an upward posture, but...

Tiger skeleton side view (drawn by Richard Lydekker)

As for the expression "the mane on the body stands up", "mane" specifically refers to the hair on the neck of some animals, such as the vertical hair on the neck of a horse and the circular hair on the neck of a lion.

But in our common sense, tigers don't seem to have majestic manes on their necks like lions (males). In fact, some tiger subspecies, such as the Sumatran tiger, have been observed to have underdeveloped manes on their necks.

Some Sumatran tigers have rudimentary manes on their necks (Source: Quora)

However, despite the above exceptions, it is still unknown which subspecies of tiger the Yangshao culture ancestors who made the clam shell sculptures of dragon and tiger patterns observed, and whether this subspecies of tiger had mane or did not have mane and was just artistically exaggerated by the Yangshao ancestors.

[Cultural and Historical Knowledge] Cultural relics can be divided into "movable cultural relics" and "immovable cultural relics". Although the three groups of "clamshell dragon and tiger sculptures" discovered at the Xishuipo site were made of clam shells, they are different from the first two types of "cultural relics" because once we artificially displace these clam shells, the historical and cultural information they contain will be destroyed, and it is very likely that they will not be able to be restored, so they should be called "immovable cultural relics".

Yinxu Culture: Tigers made of various materials...

You must know this common sense: Yinxu in Anyang, Henan Province was the capital of the late Shang Dynasty. Bronze artifacts, oracle bones, palaces, etc. from the Shang Dynasty have been discovered there. It is a "star site" that is highly anticipated by the archaeological community.

In fact, the ancestors who lived in Yinxu in the past, mainly the Shang clan, had even more fun with tigers. They seemed to like using various materials to make tiger shapes.

For example, the marble stone tiger (Figure 1), stone tiger head with human body (Figure 3), and stone tiger head (Figure 4) discovered in the Houjiazhuang Royal Tombs area of ​​Yinxu.

The ivory cup found in the famous tomb of Fu Hao has a three-dimensional tiger shape on the lower part of the handle, and there is also a circle of "tiger pattern" on the rim of the cup.

In addition, tiger relics made of turquoise, bone, wood and other materials have been found in the Yinxu site. Most of them were unearthed from high-ranking tombs of nobles or royal family members.

In fact, this reflects to a certain extent that in the Shang Dynasty, the Huan River Basin where Yinxu is located was an important survival area for wild tigers.

Since the 1930s and 1940s, scholars represented by Mr. Yang Zhongjian have conducted research on the "Anyang Yinxu Fauna". The results show that although the remains of tigers account for a small proportion of the entire fauna, the remains of many contemporary mammals such as pigs, buffaloes, tapirs, goats, takins, rabbits, monkeys, elephants, etc. show that the area provided an important food resource for the survival of tigers, and there was probably a large number of tigers in the Huan River Basin during the Shang Dynasty.

The historical distribution of tigers in Henan shows that before the 20th century, the junction of Henan, Hebei and Shanxi provinces north of Zhengzhou (Anyang, where the Yin Ruins are located, is also within this range) was an important distribution area for tigers. (Source: Atlas of the distribution and changes of rare wild animals in China)

The Royal Ontario Museum in Canada also houses a precious cultural relic that reflects the "human-tiger relationship" at that time, a piece of tiger bone (the humerus of the right front leg) with inscriptions, the contents of which are:

In the year of Xinyou, the king went to farm in Jilu and caught a large tiger. In the tenth month, the king offered sacrifices to the king for the third time on the day of the tiger's death.

Facsimiles and rubbings of tiger bone inscriptions (Source: Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the White Collection)

The general meaning is that the King of Shang went out hunting and hunted a tiger. It must be said that the prey obtained by the King of Shang was much higher quality than the prey obtained by the Qing Dynasty emperors during the "Mulan Autumn Hunt"...

From the Chengdu Plain to the Huan River, and from the Huan River to the Liao River, the ancients on this vast land observed tigers and created scenes of "tigers". We can no longer see these scenes, but in the face of the grim situation of wild tiger populations today, let us call for a commitment to better protect them as the Year of the Tiger approaches!

The knowledge about tigers is much more interesting than we thought!

References:

Yang Hua. On the worship of tiger by the Ba people[J]. Chinese Archaeology, 1997(04):71-79.

Guo Dashun. Tiger-shaped jade ornaments of Hongshan culture and related issues[J]. Journal of Jilin Normal University, 2018, 46(1):13.

Ding Qingxian, Zhang Xiangmei. A brief report on the excavation of Xishuipo site in Puyang, Henan in 1988[J]. Archaeology, 1989(12):12.

Wen Rongsheng. Atlas of distribution changes of rare wild animals in China[M]. Jinan: Shandong Science and Technology Press, 2019

Ma Jianzhang. Tiger Research[M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, 2003

Yang Zhongjian, Liu Dongsheng. Supplementary information on the mammalian community of Yinxu in Anyang[J]. Acta Archaeologica Sinica, 1949(4):9.

Paleobiology Database: Machairodontinae basic info

The Paleobiology Database Hyaenodontidae page

Michael Morlo, Stéphane Peigné and Doris Nagel. A new species of Prosansanosmilus: implications for the systematic relationships of the family Barbourofelidae new rank (Carnivora, Mammalia). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. January 2004, 140 (1): 43.

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Author: Archaeology Xueqi, Master of History, Wuhan University, majoring in Shang and Zhou Dynasty archaeology

Tadpole Musical Notation original article/reprint please indicate the source

Editor/Xiao Xitushuo